Dashboard Design as Policy Design
Why public-sector performance dashboards are not neutral information systems but policy instruments that constitute particular kinds of publics. A series tracing the theory, politics, and evidence of transparency dashboard design.
Part of: RIPT - Reporting, Insights, Publications & Transparency (2025–2026)
- 1
Dashboards as Policy Instruments
December 19, 2025
Performance dashboards in the public sector do not arrive without genealogy. As Leoni (2022) documents, the importance attached to data in public governance "might be the result of a longstanding...
- 2
How Dashboards Constitute Publics: A Theoretical Framework
December 20, 2025
This post develops the theoretical argument introduced in the series introduction on dashboards as policy instruments: that public-sector performance dashboards actively constitute the publics they...
- 3
The Politics of Performance Transparency
December 21, 2025
The series introduction established that public sector performance dashboards function as policy instruments, and the previous post examined how different dashboard designs constitute different...
- 4
From Deficit Models to Sense-Making
December 22, 2025
This article draws on an interpretivist analysis of public sector dashboard strategy, treating dashboards as socio-technical systems embedded in organisational and political contexts rather than...
- 6
The Sunlight Hypothesis
December 24, 2025
The previous posts in this series established why the deficit model fails as an account of how dashboard users engage with performance data, and the competing theories of change analysis examined the...